Really? Living in the heart of the southwest, this is the first I've heard of that.
Actually my wife is from the Southwest (New Mexico) and is very aware of this. When she applied to university several initially sent her the foreign student application forms until she pointed out that New Mexico was not actually part of Mexico. In fact there is an an amusing column in the New Mexico magazine about Americans not realizing that New Mexico is actually part of the US.
It's similar in the UK and Canada too - failing to pass the budget counts as a vote of no confidence in the government which triggers a general election. Having lived in the US for several years though I think the problem with their system of government is that it has not been updated in over 200 years. It started off as a brilliant, world-leading system for the late 18th century but it has so many checks and balances in it that updating it is all but impossible without an overwhelming consensus that is rarely achievable. The result is that they are left limping along with a 200+ year old governmental system that was designed when communication with the capital took days or weeks by horse.
a country is soveriegn and its right to refuse access to any non-citizen is absolute.
Agreed.
however, this case isn't really about that.
Not directly but the two are closely linked. The US, as is its right, has set down laws for who may visit. Likewise, as its right, it has passed domestic laws that grant the right to freedom of speech and regards these laws as so important and central to the country that it has given them special protection and made them far harder to change.
In the current case it seems that it is willing to ignore, or at least work around, its own immigration laws to subvert the freedom of speech law by denying a foreigner the ability to speak with Americans. If it is willing to do that how much longer before it finds another law which it can use on American citizens to deny or restrict their right to free speech? Do you really think that the US constitution will stand up to a concerted legal attack by the US government - the very body charged with defending it?
I have huge ethical and moral problems with the suspending free speech. However it seems to me that the US government regards suspending free speech more as a legal problem.
Depends on how you define a right. The important thing is that you have the permission/right to enter unless a US court determines that you do not. With a J-1 visa you also have "permission" but the border guard can deny you entry and there is no appeal, no legal recourse nothing. You are barred from the US for IIRC 3 years and there is nothing you can do about it. Although I have no doubt that many such refusals are probably well justified. Indeed most US border guards I have encountered are extremely courteous and professional but not all of them and because of the lack of any appeal it only takes one bad one (or a good one on a bad day) to really cause major problems for innocent people.
there is no right to enter the USA unless you are a citizen
That's factually wrong - "resident aliens" to use the US governments description have a right to enter the US. This was the only reason I got a green card when living in the US because my job required travel to academic conferences and after one incident where I was almost denied entry with my J-1 visa simply because I was married to an American we applied for a green card because then it was impossible for them to refuse me entry and my job depended on being able to return.
However it also misses the point which is that your government thinks it is fine to exclude people from the US who disagree with its policies. If it is willing to do that to foreigners coming for rational academic debate how much longer do you think it will be before they find a way to silence your criticisms too?
Good point - but then this should be included. I suppose what I would argue for is a "total cost of ownership" per km to be given. As a customer I don't really care whether I am spending the money on wear and tear or on fuel - I want to know how much I am spending. If the maintenance costs are so much lower than a petrol car that they offset the currently incredibly expensive batteries they should use this as a selling point. The fact that they have not done this suggests that the battery costs far outweigh the saving in maintenance and fuel costs.
Why so complicated? Simply have a site outside California and/or US. So long as they have no presence in California they have no need to implement an erase button.
the sheer amount of 'information' that is hosted in the US would make any 'internet' experience without it severely lacking.
Given that the national language of Brazil is portuguese I would be amazed if there is much US-based information available in that language. As a result I expect that the impact would be a lot less than you imagine. In addition, if they set it up well under an international mode I expect other countries will want to join.
I agree - it does seem to be sour grapes but they do have some good points. However they do seem to miss one. Tesla claim that you save money on petrol. While true if you factor in the cost of the wear on the battery per km driven then cost of an electric car's fuel is actually far higher than a petrol car. With the cost of petrol continuously increasing and battery lifetimes increasing at some point electric cars will win but any fair comparison of the fuel costs must include the battery wear cost.
There used to be a kid's show in the UK called "Rainbow" that did a hilarious version full of innuendo. However my understanding was that it was a spoof version done by the cast and crew and never broadcast. There was also the apocryphal character namess in another kids show called "Captain Pugwash" but this is nothing more than an urban legend since the actual character names were "Master Mate" and "Seaman Baines"...I'll let you figure out what the legend has them as!
It's not just oil - will our new Apple products come with the label: "Designed by Apple in a country which undertakes secret rendition, torture and massive online surveillance and privacy invasion."?
If the courses that university is still teaching first years have not adapted to a known change for like a decade, that is their fault, not the high schools.
You are completely missing the point - Universities cannot adapt to this change without lower standards or addition time to teach both of which are constrained. Certain programs have external qualification standards that must be met e.g. medicine, engineering etc. and governments will not allow us to extend the length of programs because it would cost them money. So what do you suggest? We get the professional bodies to lower the qualification standards and you can then be operated on by a half-qualified surgeon assuming the hospital building you are in does not collapse first because it was built by a half-qualified engineer?
The decision to lower high school education was anything but a conscious decision. Indeed the rhetoric from governments, school boards and even some teachers has always been that they are pushing excellence and that standards are as high as ever. Have you ever seen any government/school board/teacher anywhere advertize a new school curriculum update as lowering standards so more students can pass? The two possibilities are that either these groups are telling one massive lie or else the lowering of standards has been an unconscious result of curriculum changes and updates. Personally I tend to follow the motto "never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" so I think the latter is the most like scenario.
Exactly how do you see it as a university's fault that it is having trouble coping with less educated students? If students arrive with less education then there are two alternatives: either you lower the standards required for a degree or you lengthen the time taken to get a degree. Those employing students would not be happy if we lowered our standards nor do we want to. However governments control the length of degree program's and will not let us increase them to a 5 year degree.
In fact the only solution I see is with MOOCs - we could imagine designing courses in basics calculus etc and having high school students take these online instead of the low quality high school curriculum. I'm
Not sure how the high schools will cope with us poaching their students though...but if they are not going to educate them properly someone needs to.
I would also disagree that the current system provides educate to everyone: it provides education to the lowest common denominator. Some how the sports system manages to cope with students of differing degrees of ability and nobody objects to the most athletic students being given opportunities to improve their abilities. So why can we not have a curriculum for the brighter students which meets their needs and prepares them better fora university education? This is not only fair it is what society should want - these bright sparks are the ones who may well end up creating jobs for others if we help them achieve their full potential.
If you ignore some of the horrendous data points, like large swaths of the US, Highschool is pretty good.
Really? When I went to secondary school everyone aiming for university - even those taking english - had to take O' level maths which included basic calculus, matrices etc. (see an old paper here). Those taking physics had not only taken A' level maths and were familiar with trig and exponential calculus as well as second order differential equations but were also familiar with applying these to solving problems in physics.
Compare that to today in Canada where some of the school leavers who have taken the optional "intro to calculus course" (the hardest level maths course offered at high school) have never heard of an integral, have no idea what a complex number is, do not know how to take the scalar product of two vectors and have never used 3D vectors before (so forget the cross product, let alone matrices!).
The students we take in are just as smart as ever - they can easily learn this stuff given time - the problem is that the school system is not teaching them what they need to be prepared for university and the situation is slowly getting worse, not better.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you're wedging your cutting edge research into an intro class, you're almost certainly doing it wrong.
Really? As long as you pick your topic and cover it at the right level I do not see a problem. Dark Matter is an excellent case in point: in particle physics we look for it by missing momentum and astronomers detect it using newtonian gravity. Both of these are basic first year physics concepts. Obviously I don't go over the detailed mathematical derivation of a galactic rotation curve but you can cover it in enough detail that students can grasp the concepts.
Another, even more recent example is talking about inertia and relating the mass of an electron to the Higgs field. Again no maths involved but I think it is worth pointing out to students that some really simple questions that they can ask, like why does an electron have a mass?, have only just been answered. It encourages them to ask themselves such simple, fundamental questions and who knows perhaps one day one of them might become a scientist themselves and find an answer?
It's like giving someone a fork, we just assume it's intuitive and everyone will know how to use it, but give a fork to a two year old and watch them try to use it. Hilarity ensues.
That might be a factor but I think (speaking as a prof) that I get better at realizing what is intuitive and what is not as I teach because if I assume something is "obvious" and it is not then I'll have 10 students outside my office asking about it. However, something I do find hard to adjust to is the ever decreasing standards of high school education. Tenured faculty rarely have time to run remedial sessions to help less academic students cope with the ever widening gap. However sessional lecturers do not have research programs and service work to worry about to the same extent and, at least where I am, several do run such sessions to help less able students. So I am not surprised to learn that less able students showed the largest performance increase.
Speaking as a tenured faculty member the conclusion that people employed entirely for their teaching with zero other consideration makes sense...but that does not make it correct and the evidence is rather circumstantial. For a start while having a sessional may cause more students to continue in a particular program is this because they are inspired or is it because they make the material seem simpler (perhaps partly because they may be better teachers but also because they will not complicate matters by introducing their own cutting edge research)? For many students, the perceived ease of a course is a large factor in their decision to take it.
The other issue is that many tenured faculty have been around for a while and find it increasingly hard to deal with students whose education at high school is getting increasingly worse. It would be interesting to see if the effect is still there at higher level courses where the ever decreasing academic standards and discipline of schools is less of a factor. Non-tenured faculty tend to be younger and so the gap in academic standards between their high school years and now is less so they likely have a better picture of what the incoming students do, or rather, do not know.
Every single UK privatisation since 1979 has been ideological...and not one has improved as a result.
I would generally agree with that statement with one exception: telephones. Privatising BT was a huge leap forward and massively modernized the system as well as lowering costs...but only because there was real competition. The rest have been a complete waste of time and money.
Criminals and terrorists do not have a problem getting around the NSA
No, intelligent criminals and terrorists do not have a problem getting around the NSA. The fact remains that many are not intelligent because in many societies intelligent people can do better for themselves by working as part of society and even the intelligent crooks and terrorists probably have to work with incompetent ones so their plans will probably become accessible to the NSA.
The issue with NSA surveillance is not that it doesn't achieve its stated aim - it undoubtedly does - the issue is whether this is an acceptable means to achieve that aim - and for many of us it is most certainly not.
Climate change is reality - there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is currently warming. There is overwhelming evidence that the climate in the past has changed e.g. 10,000 year ago there was an ice age. Some of these cycles are well understood and related to natural phenomena e.g. precession of the earth's axis of rotation. The question which is being debated is how much of the current warming is natural vs. man-made.
The debate is complicated by the media's lack of reporters with any level of scientific training or competence. They have trouble distinguishing weather (day to day conditions) from climate (average over multiple years). They also seem unable to distinguish between pseudo-scientists and real scientists. This by itself is pretty typical but, unlike many cases (e.g. LHC black holes destroying the earth) there is no clear scientific consensus yet with which to counter the pseudo-scientists which makes it very hard for those of us not involved in the field to really understand what the current state of the real scientific debate is.
Surely any false and defamatory statement in conversation is slander, not libel. I thought libel required it to be written down? However the truth is an allowed defence, at least according to this which claims it is the "justification" defence.
No, truth is an effective defence against libel. The difference is that the onus is on the person making the statement to prove that what they wrote is true rather than the person bringing the court case. This can cause problems if you were, for example, commenting that chiropractice pushes bogus treatments because it is hard to prove a negative. Fortunately that case was won and things have improved somewhat since then.
Slashdot Mirror
Really? Living in the heart of the southwest, this is the first I've heard of that.
Actually my wife is from the Southwest (New Mexico) and is very aware of this. When she applied to university several initially sent her the foreign student application forms until she pointed out that New Mexico was not actually part of Mexico. In fact there is an an amusing column in the New Mexico magazine about Americans not realizing that New Mexico is actually part of the US.
It's similar in the UK and Canada too - failing to pass the budget counts as a vote of no confidence in the government which triggers a general election. Having lived in the US for several years though I think the problem with their system of government is that it has not been updated in over 200 years. It started off as a brilliant, world-leading system for the late 18th century but it has so many checks and balances in it that updating it is all but impossible without an overwhelming consensus that is rarely achievable. The result is that they are left limping along with a 200+ year old governmental system that was designed when communication with the capital took days or weeks by horse.
a country is soveriegn and its right to refuse access to any non-citizen is absolute.
Agreed.
however, this case isn't really about that.
Not directly but the two are closely linked. The US, as is its right, has set down laws for who may visit. Likewise, as its right, it has passed domestic laws that grant the right to freedom of speech and regards these laws as so important and central to the country that it has given them special protection and made them far harder to change.
In the current case it seems that it is willing to ignore, or at least work around, its own immigration laws to subvert the freedom of speech law by denying a foreigner the ability to speak with Americans. If it is willing to do that how much longer before it finds another law which it can use on American citizens to deny or restrict their right to free speech? Do you really think that the US constitution will stand up to a concerted legal attack by the US government - the very body charged with defending it?
I have huge ethical and moral problems with the suspending free speech. However it seems to me that the US government regards suspending free speech more as a legal problem.
You don't have a right. You have permission.
Depends on how you define a right. The important thing is that you have the permission/right to enter unless a US court determines that you do not. With a J-1 visa you also have "permission" but the border guard can deny you entry and there is no appeal, no legal recourse nothing. You are barred from the US for IIRC 3 years and there is nothing you can do about it. Although I have no doubt that many such refusals are probably well justified. Indeed most US border guards I have encountered are extremely courteous and professional but not all of them and because of the lack of any appeal it only takes one bad one (or a good one on a bad day) to really cause major problems for innocent people.
there is no right to enter the USA unless you are a citizen
That's factually wrong - "resident aliens" to use the US governments description have a right to enter the US. This was the only reason I got a green card when living in the US because my job required travel to academic conferences and after one incident where I was almost denied entry with my J-1 visa simply because I was married to an American we applied for a green card because then it was impossible for them to refuse me entry and my job depended on being able to return.
However it also misses the point which is that your government thinks it is fine to exclude people from the US who disagree with its policies. If it is willing to do that to foreigners coming for rational academic debate how much longer do you think it will be before they find a way to silence your criticisms too?
Good point - but then this should be included. I suppose what I would argue for is a "total cost of ownership" per km to be given. As a customer I don't really care whether I am spending the money on wear and tear or on fuel - I want to know how much I am spending. If the maintenance costs are so much lower than a petrol car that they offset the currently incredibly expensive batteries they should use this as a selling point. The fact that they have not done this suggests that the battery costs far outweigh the saving in maintenance and fuel costs.
Since it's a law, presumably these sites can be prosecuted under those laws, and they are prosecuted by the government.
Only if the site is in California. This is why laws passed by one country, or bit of a country, cannot regulate the internet.
Why so complicated? Simply have a site outside California and/or US. So long as they have no presence in California they have no need to implement an erase button.
the sheer amount of 'information' that is hosted in the US would make any 'internet' experience without it severely lacking.
Given that the national language of Brazil is portuguese I would be amazed if there is much US-based information available in that language. As a result I expect that the impact would be a lot less than you imagine. In addition, if they set it up well under an international mode I expect other countries will want to join.
I agree - it does seem to be sour grapes but they do have some good points. However they do seem to miss one. Tesla claim that you save money on petrol. While true if you factor in the cost of the wear on the battery per km driven then cost of an electric car's fuel is actually far higher than a petrol car. With the cost of petrol continuously increasing and battery lifetimes increasing at some point electric cars will win but any fair comparison of the fuel costs must include the battery wear cost.
There used to be a kid's show in the UK called "Rainbow" that did a hilarious version full of innuendo. However my understanding was that it was a spoof version done by the cast and crew and never broadcast. There was also the apocryphal character namess in another kids show called "Captain Pugwash" but this is nothing more than an urban legend since the actual character names were "Master Mate" and "Seaman Baines"...I'll let you figure out what the legend has them as!
It's not just oil - will our new Apple products come with the label: "Designed by Apple in a country which undertakes secret rendition, torture and massive online surveillance and privacy invasion."?
If the courses that university is still teaching first years have not adapted to a known change for like a decade, that is their fault, not the high schools.
You are completely missing the point - Universities cannot adapt to this change without lower standards or addition time to teach both of which are constrained. Certain programs have external qualification standards that must be met e.g. medicine, engineering etc. and governments will not allow us to extend the length of programs because it would cost them money. So what do you suggest? We get the professional bodies to lower the qualification standards and you can then be operated on by a half-qualified surgeon assuming the hospital building you are in does not collapse first because it was built by a half-qualified engineer?
The decision to lower high school education was anything but a conscious decision. Indeed the rhetoric from governments, school boards and even some teachers has always been that they are pushing excellence and that standards are as high as ever. Have you ever seen any government/school board/teacher anywhere advertize a new school curriculum update as lowering standards so more students can pass? The two possibilities are that either these groups are telling one massive lie or else the lowering of standards has been an unconscious result of curriculum changes and updates. Personally I tend to follow the motto "never ascribe to malice that which can be explained by incompetence" so I think the latter is the most like scenario.
Exactly how do you see it as a university's fault that it is having trouble coping with less educated students? If students arrive with less education then there are two alternatives: either you lower the standards required for a degree or you lengthen the time taken to get a degree. Those employing students would not be happy if we lowered our standards nor do we want to. However governments control the length of degree program's and will not let us increase them to a 5 year degree. In fact the only solution I see is with MOOCs - we could imagine designing courses in basics calculus etc and having high school students take these online instead of the low quality high school curriculum. I'm Not sure how the high schools will cope with us poaching their students though...but if they are not going to educate them properly someone needs to. I would also disagree that the current system provides educate to everyone: it provides education to the lowest common denominator. Some how the sports system manages to cope with students of differing degrees of ability and nobody objects to the most athletic students being given opportunities to improve their abilities. So why can we not have a curriculum for the brighter students which meets their needs and prepares them better fora university education? This is not only fair it is what society should want - these bright sparks are the ones who may well end up creating jobs for others if we help them achieve their full potential.
If you ignore some of the horrendous data points, like large swaths of the US, Highschool is pretty good.
Really? When I went to secondary school everyone aiming for university - even those taking english - had to take O' level maths which included basic calculus, matrices etc. (see an old paper here). Those taking physics had not only taken A' level maths and were familiar with trig and exponential calculus as well as second order differential equations but were also familiar with applying these to solving problems in physics.
Compare that to today in Canada where some of the school leavers who have taken the optional "intro to calculus course" (the hardest level maths course offered at high school) have never heard of an integral, have no idea what a complex number is, do not know how to take the scalar product of two vectors and have never used 3D vectors before (so forget the cross product, let alone matrices!).
The students we take in are just as smart as ever - they can easily learn this stuff given time - the problem is that the school system is not teaching them what they need to be prepared for university and the situation is slowly getting worse, not better.
I don't think it's a stretch to say that if you're wedging your cutting edge research into an intro class, you're almost certainly doing it wrong.
Really? As long as you pick your topic and cover it at the right level I do not see a problem. Dark Matter is an excellent case in point: in particle physics we look for it by missing momentum and astronomers detect it using newtonian gravity. Both of these are basic first year physics concepts. Obviously I don't go over the detailed mathematical derivation of a galactic rotation curve but you can cover it in enough detail that students can grasp the concepts.
Another, even more recent example is talking about inertia and relating the mass of an electron to the Higgs field. Again no maths involved but I think it is worth pointing out to students that some really simple questions that they can ask, like why does an electron have a mass?, have only just been answered. It encourages them to ask themselves such simple, fundamental questions and who knows perhaps one day one of them might become a scientist themselves and find an answer?
It's like giving someone a fork, we just assume it's intuitive and everyone will know how to use it, but give a fork to a two year old and watch them try to use it. Hilarity ensues.
That might be a factor but I think (speaking as a prof) that I get better at realizing what is intuitive and what is not as I teach because if I assume something is "obvious" and it is not then I'll have 10 students outside my office asking about it. However, something I do find hard to adjust to is the ever decreasing standards of high school education. Tenured faculty rarely have time to run remedial sessions to help less academic students cope with the ever widening gap. However sessional lecturers do not have research programs and service work to worry about to the same extent and, at least where I am, several do run such sessions to help less able students. So I am not surprised to learn that less able students showed the largest performance increase.
Speaking as a tenured faculty member the conclusion that people employed entirely for their teaching with zero other consideration makes sense...but that does not make it correct and the evidence is rather circumstantial. For a start while having a sessional may cause more students to continue in a particular program is this because they are inspired or is it because they make the material seem simpler (perhaps partly because they may be better teachers but also because they will not complicate matters by introducing their own cutting edge research)? For many students, the perceived ease of a course is a large factor in their decision to take it.
The other issue is that many tenured faculty have been around for a while and find it increasingly hard to deal with students whose education at high school is getting increasingly worse. It would be interesting to see if the effect is still there at higher level courses where the ever decreasing academic standards and discipline of schools is less of a factor. Non-tenured faculty tend to be younger and so the gap in academic standards between their high school years and now is less so they likely have a better picture of what the incoming students do, or rather, do not know.
Every single UK privatisation since 1979 has been ideological...and not one has improved as a result.
I would generally agree with that statement with one exception: telephones. Privatising BT was a huge leap forward and massively modernized the system as well as lowering costs...but only because there was real competition. The rest have been a complete waste of time and money.
Criminals and terrorists do not have a problem getting around the NSA
No, intelligent criminals and terrorists do not have a problem getting around the NSA. The fact remains that many are not intelligent because in many societies intelligent people can do better for themselves by working as part of society and even the intelligent crooks and terrorists probably have to work with incompetent ones so their plans will probably become accessible to the NSA.
The issue with NSA surveillance is not that it doesn't achieve its stated aim - it undoubtedly does - the issue is whether this is an acceptable means to achieve that aim - and for many of us it is most certainly not.
Climate change is reality - there is overwhelming evidence that the earth is currently warming. There is overwhelming evidence that the climate in the past has changed e.g. 10,000 year ago there was an ice age. Some of these cycles are well understood and related to natural phenomena e.g. precession of the earth's axis of rotation. The question which is being debated is how much of the current warming is natural vs. man-made.
The debate is complicated by the media's lack of reporters with any level of scientific training or competence. They have trouble distinguishing weather (day to day conditions) from climate (average over multiple years). They also seem unable to distinguish between pseudo-scientists and real scientists. This by itself is pretty typical but, unlike many cases (e.g. LHC black holes destroying the earth) there is no clear scientific consensus yet with which to counter the pseudo-scientists which makes it very hard for those of us not involved in the field to really understand what the current state of the real scientific debate is.
Surely any false and defamatory statement in conversation is slander, not libel. I thought libel required it to be written down? However the truth is an allowed defence, at least according to this which claims it is the "justification" defence.
In Britain? Absolutely.
No, truth is an effective defence against libel. The difference is that the onus is on the person making the statement to prove that what they wrote is true rather than the person bringing the court case. This can cause problems if you were, for example, commenting that chiropractice pushes bogus treatments because it is hard to prove a negative. Fortunately that case was won and things have improved somewhat since then.
There is no school system in this country - there are many school systems.
That depends on value of "this country".